MacOS Requirements: 💵💵💵

Debian 13.

Tried open suse, but on my laptop it was slow and loud and the battery would die almost instantly (had to make it hibernate rather than suspend if I wanted it to make it through the night).

Installed Debian 13 and it feels like a new laptop. Not sure what exactly made the difference between the two but I’m not complaining…

Before we all jump ship to linux phones, is it possible that custom android ROMs can remove this feature?

Not sure I like their definition of declarative. I’d instead say that a config is “declarative” if the result of applying that configuration is independent of the current state of the system.

MacOS

I had a go at using guix as a package manager on top of an existing distro (first an immutable fedora, which went terribly, then OpenSUSE). Gave up for a few reasons:

• As mentioned in the article, guix pull is sloow.
• Packages were very out of date, even Emacs. If I understand correctly, 30.1 was only added last month, despite having been available since February. I get that this isn’t the longest wait, but for the piece of software you can expect most guix users to be running, it doesn’t bode well.
• The project I was interested in trying out (Gypsum) had a completely broken manifest. Seems like it worked on the dev’s machine though, which made me concerned about how well guix profiles actually isolate Dev environments. This was probably an error on the dev’s part, but I’d argue such errors should be hard to make by design.

All in all I love the idea of guix, but I think it needs a bigger community behind it. Of course I’m part of the problem by walking away, but 🤷

You know, the more I think about this, the more I bristle at Dyson claiming this will solve Britain’s food security problem.

Firstly, this kind of system seems limited to small cash crops rather than staple foods. (Good luck growing wheat on these.)

More importantly, Dyson has personally done far more to harm British food security than this gadget could offset. He was an ardent Brexiteer, which resulted in substantial barriers to importing food from our closest neighbors. (He also then immediately started relocating his business to Singapore in a stunning show of confidence in post-Brexit Britain)

These people don’t want to save the world. They just want to look like heroes

Yes, but it’s still competing with a field full of dirt. So the value add has to be pretty substantial to justify any cost.

Not saying I disagree, but out of curiosity I looked up the yield of a conventional strawberry field, which is apparently 15-25 tons per hectare, or 11-18% of your threshold.

I agree that this would likely never be economically viable for strawberries, as I imagine it’d cost way more than £1M for a “hectares worth” of this setup.

More importantly, I don’t consider strawberries vital to our food security, unlike Dyson

Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they’re useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.

Most of their quotes come from this Ono guy…

Ono, who is also a freelance mathematical consultant for Epoch AI.

Ahhh, there it is.

There’s something chilling about an expert being asked if a statement represents their opinion, them saying “no”, then the statement appearing regardless but attributed to “some experts”

If you’re able to easily migrate issues etc to a new instance, then you don’t need to worry about a particular service providers getting shitty. At which point your main concern is temporary outages.

Perhaps this is more of a concern for some projects (e.g. anything that angers Nintendo’s lawyers). But for most, I imagine that the added complexity of distributed p2p hosting would outweigh the upsides.

Not saying it’s a bad idea, in fact I like it a lot, but I can see why it’s not a high priority for most OSS devs

The project’s official repo should probably exist in a single location so that there is an authoritative version. At that point p2p is only necessary if traffic for the source code is getting too expensive for the project.

Personally I think the source hut model is closest to the ideal set up for OSS projects. Though I use Codeberg for my personal stuff because I’m cheap and lazy

Its actually GNU image manipulation program, so pretty much.

Or “Green Is My Pepper” if you ask RMS…

I think it means client-server basically. You can host a server in “the cloud” then access a frontend to it via your browser.

Might also mean it has features relevant to debugging/deploying cloud services.

Cloud is often a BS marketing word, but I’m sure there’s ways to make it justifiable in this case. (Not that any of us has to like these features. I for once can’t stand the idea of having my editor run inside a browser…)

There’s a river Foss that runs through York. Brings a new meaning to sending patches upstream…

Yeah, I’m leaning toward this option tbh.

If we got to the point where popular machines had custom images with all the necessary extra drivers etc, it might be a value add. But for now I’m not seeing a huge benefit

Yeah, thinking I might have to do something similar to start the services after login. Unfortunately they need to run as root, so it’ll be tricky to avoid having a second password prompt every time I login

Some updates after sleeping on it and trying some morning debugging:

• It’s actually either service being enabled that prevents login
• It’s a gnome-shell issue. Logging into a tty is fine, and shows that it’s gnome-shell crashing when trying to log-in normally

Maybe it’s time to go back to debian…